Month: January 2017
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Thomas De Quincey and Confessions of an English Opium-Eater: Opium as medicine and beyond
Jared GriffinPennsauken, New Jersey, United States If a man “whose talk is of oxen,” should become an Opium-eater,the probability is, that (if he is not too dull to dream at all)—he will dream about oxen:whereas, in the case before him, the reader will find that the Opium-eater boasteth himself to be a philosopher;and accordingly, that…
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Mysterious muse
Juliet HubbellLittleton, Colorado, United States Few muses are both beautiful and dead, but one such modern muse is L’inconnue de la Seine, a young woman whose drowned corpse so inspired the Parisian morgue personnel who received her body in 1902 that a death mask or masque mortuaire was made of her serenely smiling face. In…
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Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych, and the five stages of grief
Katharine LawrenceFlorida, United States Ivan Ilych saw that he was dying, and he was in continual despair. “Vermiform appendix! Kidney!” he said to himself. “It’s not a question of appendix or kidney, but of life and . . . death. Yes, life was there and now it is going, going and I cannot stop it.…
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Peter Mark Roget, MD, FRS of the Thesaurus
His obituary as it appeared in the British Medical Journal on Sept. 25, 1869 Dr. Peter Mark Roget died on September 10th, at Malvern, in the 91st year of his age. He was the son of the Rev. John Roget, a descendant of a Swiss family, and minister of one of the Swiss churches in…
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On the skill of physicians
“I am not partial to physicians myself. In minor matters a proper diet is better than a doctor; in major matters they do not seem to have much skill. No doctor has yet learnt to cure a broken neck. However, they have their place, like others in the world. No duel should be fought without…
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On being idle and a patient
“Many years ago, when I was a young man, I was taken very ill—I never could see myself that much was the matter with me, except that I had a beastly cold. But I suppose it was something very serious, for the doctor said that I ought to have come to him a month before,…
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Richard Selzer: the birth of literature and medicine
Mahala StriplingFort Worth, Texas, United States Richard Selzer was among the first physicians to understand the power of writing and reading fiction within medicine.He helped to open up this whole territory to those of us who came after. His legacy is, on the one hand, the text—what he’s written—and, on the other hand, what I…
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Dear doctor
Melanie ChengMelbourne, Australia It was her mother’s doing. After all, it was her mother who taught her how to read. Not just in the literal sense—with Little Golden Books a good year before she started school—but in the broader sense of the word, through the sharing of musty, broken-backed treasures. Entire summer holidays could be…
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Mikhael Bulgakov’s “The Steel Windpipe” in A Country Doctor’s Notebook
Michael BloorUnited Kingdom Anton Chechov (1860–1904) is Russia’s most famous literary doctor, but another of Russia’s great twentieth century authors also practised medicine. Mikhael Bulgakov (1891–1940) was the banned author of The Master and Marguerita, first published twenty-six years after his death, a novel credited as a progenitor of magic realism and as the inspiration…
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Anton Chekhov and the Sakhalin Penal Colony
Michael BloorUnited Kingdom In the nineteenth century the Czarist Government wanted to create an Arctic Australia by establishing a penal colony on Sakhalin Island, off the eastern coast of Siberia some five thousand miles from European Russia. There convicts who had served out their sentences would be obliged to stay as settlers, albeit in a…